A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

My second job in the industry was as a mid-level programmer at Vicarious Visions (VV), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision (ATVI). About a year before I started there, VV had been tapped by ATVI to do the Wii port of Guitar Hero 3.

As an aside, the PS2 version was being developed by Budcat Creations, and the primary X360/PS3 SKUs were developed by Neversoft. The Wii and PS2 SKUs were based on the "Skate7" engine, and X360/PS3 the "Skate9" engine. Yes, Guitar Hero 3 and up ran on the Tony Hawk engine.

The Wii version started as an upward port from the PS2, with some features ported in from the X360/PS3 SKUs, which was an interesting task given that it involved jumping across two major revisions of APIs.

I joined shortly before GH3 shipped, and just before the first band-specific iteration, GH: Aerosmith, began development. I was hired partly for my passion for the series; I had written a basic 2D clone of the game, which could parse the original note track data from GH1 and GH2.

To digress once again, the reason why ATVI had the GH license, but not the original GH team, more or less falls squarely on ATVI's corporate acquisition culture. ATVI were initially in talks to buy Harmonix (HMX), the original GH developers, outright.

HMX were proud, passionate Bostonians, however, and bristled at ATVI's insistence that the company be relocated to the west coast. "We won't do that," they said, "but we will sell you the GH license." Thus began the long-standing rivalry between GH and what was to be Rock Band.

We turned out game after game. We watched internally at ATVI's hubris, with executives hiring market "experts" to tell them what they wanted to hear, which seemed to be that they could sell a plastic guitar to every man, woman and child on the planet.

Possibly neighboring planets, even, if *only* they could make a band-specific or genre-specific iteration that appealed to them. The idea that some people simply don't like the music/rhythm genre seemed to be entirely absent from the company's line of thinking.

During the development of GH: Warriors of Rock (ostensibly GH6), we were ecstatic when we were told by the studio heads that ATVI had opted not to task RedOctane with making another iteration of the controller, as market research said that everyone who wanted one already had one.

Nobody was shocked when later in development we were told there would, in fact, be another iteration of the controller. Even better, the Wiimote would be mounted facing opposite than before. At the eleventh hour, we had to tweak our motion detection code for invoking Star Power.

More exciting news, though, was disclosed to us midway through Warriors of Rock - that Neversoft felt they were running out of ideas on directions to take the GH franchise. We at VV were going to be the ones to take over the primary SKUs after Warriors of Rock shipped.

Simultaneously with the finalization process of WoR, VV began development on GH7, codenamed "Phoenix" for obvious reasons. Among other things, we were going to expand the number of buttons from 5 to 6 (adding a purple button), and add a pluckable six-string module to the body.

We came up with an interactive hub, where the player could chill in between gigs, and which the player would eventually be able to upgrade with proceeds from gigs. The venues themselves would be more expansive, and more like a music video than previous iterations of the series.

Development was well underway by early 2011. In January the executives visited to evaluate the state of our progress. By all accounts they were excited about the direction we were heading, even pushing the release date out by a year, to give more time for polish - so we thought.

When most of VV's internal QA were laid off in late January, many saw it as a matter of course - with Spyro 3DS not shipping until at least September of that year, and with Phoenix having a proposed release date in late 2012, it was logical that there was no need for a ton of QA.

I, on the other hand, saw it as a harbinger. I reasoned that with the studio only having two games in development, and a year in between releases, that the personnel growth the company had had in order to support three concurrent projects would need to contract proportionally.

In early February of 2011, the Q4 2010 earnings call was going to be made to shareholders, where the company would disclose its earnings results for that fiscal quarter. The morning of the day of the call, everyone at VV received an e-mail from the head of Human Resources.

Paraphrasing: "The Q4 2010 earnings call is going to happen at 16:00 in our time zone, and we will be having an all-hands meeting in the kitchen at 15:00 to discuss what it means for the company" - cue the record-scratch sound effect.

You could almost see the e-mail landing in peoples' inboxes, and how often people checked said inboxes, based on how the wave of low-grade panic swept through the studio. Some people became obviously emotionally numb. Some cracked gallows-humor jokes.

Some, like me, searched high and low for any of the studio executives to try to get a straight answer as to what was going on, only to find that they were all conspicuously absent. Finally, I was able to find one of the Bala brothers - the founders of VV - wandering the halls.

"Guha," I said, "I'm freaking out. Just give me a straight answer: Am I still going to have a job tomorrow?" He sighed, replying, "Ryan, you know I can't answer that. That information could be considered insider trading." At that point I knew what was going down: The head count.

It would've revealed nothing about the earnings call to say that people would still be employed the next day - but it would be obvious, were a layoff disclosed. He continued, "But if you're feeling panicky, feel free to go take lunch early. Just be back before the earnings call."

I went back to my desk to fire off a brief e-mail to HR, asking them to please at least come and get me before the meeting to tell me what's going on, because being on the autism spectrum, I don't do well with a lack of information and dread looming over my head.

I subsequently went outside to get a breath of fresh air before heading to lunch, and to perhaps find someone with whom to commiserate. The man of the hour happened to be the lead programmer of the two most recent iterations of the Wii SKU of GH, a most excellent dude named Eric.

A wonderful guy, he bucked the trend at VV that programmers needed to be micromanaged, and instead simply treated us all with respect. He let us do our jobs, confident that we'd been hired for a reason, and would do the right thing without being asked, "How's your tasks going?"

As it happened, this made him persona non grata among VV management, who wanted him to take a "more active" stance with the programmers beneath him. It got worse when the two iterations of Guitar Hero Wii that he oversaw went the smoothest, technically, of all of them.

I remember asking him what he thought would happen, and him opining to the effect of, "I can't imagine they're going to lay people off or shut the studio down. The execs just looked at Phoenix last month and were stoked!" He always did stay positive in the face of adversity.

I then drove home to my roomies, one of whom was a QA tester who had been laid off the previous month, and one of whom was a senior designer who had been laid off the previous September in a hush-hush layoff of about seven people. I told them what I suspected was going down.

We then hopped in my car, drove to a local diner where we had enjoyed numerous lunches before when we all still worked at VV, and tried our best to forget about the fact that soon, the last one of us would be out of a job, too.

Returning to the office shortly before 15:00, I sat at my desk and simply shuffled code around until the head of HR came and got me. When I saw the Development Director sitting there in her office as I walked in, I pretty much knew that I was right.